Social Psychology and Personality: Key Concepts and Theories
Social Psychology
Social Perception & Cognition
Social perception & cognition refers to the mental processes that help us collect and remember information about others, and make inferences and judgments based on it.
- Primacy effect: The first impression is the strongest.
- Stereotype: A generalized belief about a group of people. We tend to remember unusual qualities more readily than ordinary ones.
- Prejudice: An irrationally unfavorable attitude toward a group of people.
- Aversive racism: The behavior of unintentionally discriminating against some groups while still expressing that we are all equal.
- Discrimination: Behavior directed toward others, unequal treatment of different groups.
Attribution
Attribution refers to the set of thought processes we use to explain the causes of behavior. Fritz Heider is considered the founder of attribution theory.
- Internal or dispositional attributions: Explanations based on one’s perceived stable traits (e.g., a person’s demeanor).
- External or situational attributions: Explanations based on the current situation and events.
Harold Kelley suggests that we rely on three types of information before making internal or external attributions:
- Consensus information: How one individual’s behavior compares with others.
- Consistency information: How the person’s behavior varies over time.
- Distinctiveness: How the person’s behavior varies between situations.
Self-serving biases: Attributions that we use to optimize our perception of ourselves (e.g., attributing a victory in a tennis match to acute skill).
Persuasion Techniques
- Foot-in-the-door: A modest request followed by a larger one (e.g., asking to babysit for one day, then asking for two days).
- Door-in-the-face: An outrageous request followed by a more reasonable one.
- Bait-and-switch: A very favorable deal followed by additional demands.
- That’s-not-all: An offer is improved before any reply is given.
- Low-ball: A very attractive offer is made, the person commits, then the terms are made less favorable after the commitment.
Conformity and Obedience
Solomon Asch found that conformity is likely even when one could be sure that a judgment was incorrect (e.g., participants were told they were wrong, but conformed to the group’s incorrect answer).
Obedience: A form of compliance when people follow direct commands, usually from an authority figure.
Compliance: Conformity that involves acting in accordance with social pressure while privately disagreeing.
Acceptance: Conformity that involves both acting and believing in accord with social pressure.
Stanley Milgram‘s research showed that subjects would follow orders to hurt someone if an authority figure demanded it.
Personality
Psychodynamic Perspectives
Defense Mechanisms
- Projection: Attributing one’s own undesirable characteristics or motives to other people. “Leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.”
- Displacement: Diversion of an unacceptable thought or impulse from its target to a less threatening one.
- Sublimation: Transformation of sexual or aggressive energies into acceptable and prosocial behaviors.
- Reaction formation: Presentation of one’s thoughts or feelings as the extreme opposite of what they are. It causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable impulses into their opposites.
Neo-Freudians
- Karen Horney: Believed Freud exaggerated the role of sexuality in human behavior and motivation, misunderstood the motivations of women, and the dynamics of family relationships.
- Carl Jung: Proposed the concept of the collective unconscious, which contained a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ past.
- Alfred Adler: Founded the school of “Individual Psychology.” “Individual” refers to understanding the whole person, in contrast with the partitioned model of personality that was incorporated into the Freudian framework.
- Inferiority complex: An exaggerated feeling of inadequacy throughout their lives.
Humanistic Psychology
Humanistic psychology deals with values, beliefs, and consciousness, including spirituality and guiding principles by which people live their lives. Personality depends on what people believe and how they perceive and understand the world (Abraham Maslow).
- Unconditional positive regard: An attitude of acceptance of others despite their failings (Carl Rogers).
- Carl Rogers: Believed in self-actualization tendencies. He asked people to describe themselves as who they want to be (ideal) and as they actually are (real). If the two descriptions were close, the individual had a positive self-concept.
Trait Perspectives
Trait: A consistent, long-lasting tendency in behavior (e.g., sociability, shyness, assertiveness).
State: A temporary activation of a particular behavior.
The Big Five Personality Traits
- Neuroticism: The tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily.
- Extraversion: The tendency to seek stimulation and enjoy the company of other people.
- Agreeableness: The tendency to be compassionate rather than antagonistic towards others.
- Conscientiousness: The tendency to show self-discipline, to be reliable, and to strive for competence and achievement.
- Openness to experience: Refers to a tendency to enjoy new experiences and new ideas.
Other Important Concepts
- Altruism: Unselfish regard for the welfare of others.
- Equity: A condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give.
- Self-disclosure: Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.
- Lawrence Kohlberg: Founder of moral development theory, which describes reactions to moral dilemmas through stages of moral reasoning (influenced by Jean Piaget). Moral reasoning is believed to lead to ethical behavior. Kohlberg proposed six stages of moral development.
- Moral dilemmas: Problems that pit one moral value against another.